Praise for the clerk

Milan Simonich can’t seem to get over the grievous personal injury he suffered at the hands of City Clerk Yolanda Vigil, who failed to give him the results of our last election at the demands of his personal deadline (“Mayor reinvents the wheel, spins it as ingenuity,” Ringside Seat, July 24).

A couple of years ago Vigil was walking through her office and noticed that I was struggling to stay awake at the microfilm reader after an hour’s searching for the minutes of a City Council meeting that took place in 1997. She stopped and asked me about my search, then invited me to sit near her desk, found the minutes in record time, printed them out for me, and sent me on my way. Her behavior that day was typical of the clerk and her staff, who are consistently cheerful and helpful when the public comes in with a request or a problem.

Did it occur to Simonich that on the evening of an unprecedented election Vigil might be kind of exhausted after what must have been weeks if not months of overtime? Did he recall Vigil’s warning that preparing for ranked-choice voting would present her with huge problems? Did he notice that in fact she did bring off the election without a hitch? That Vigil had made a huge and successful effort to explain how ranked choice works and how to understand the ballot? Did it occur to Simonich that the failure here might have been with his sympathetic imagination?

Instead he continues to criticize a city employee who, in my experience, is outstanding and who exhibits behavior that should be a model for all of her colleagues in City Hall.

Mac Watson Santa Fe